Theme:
1. Artefacts, Buildings & Ecofacts
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Reconstructing Biological Relatedness and Inferring Human Relations in the Past
Content:
Kinship is a core element of small-scale societies, but it has not traditionally been a focus of archaeological research since the dynamic social relations that emerge from kinning practices are difficult to access from fragmented archaeological data. Funerary sites are among the few contexts that yield some evidence for intimate relations between individuals, but inferring the social practices of living people from the layout of their dead is fraught.
Over the last decade, as ancient DNA methodologies have advanced, we have witnessed the reconstruction of a growing number of genetic pedigrees, from first-degree pairs to massive trees, as well as identity-by-descent analysis giving insight into more distant links. Together, these data can provide a basic genetic framework, on which archaeological and anthropological contexts can build on by means of integration, which then allows inferences on social practices. Yet biological patterns of relatedness may map imperfectly onto complex social relations between individuals, communities, and emic understandings of lineage or descent. For instance, queer relations and others that do not result in children are impossible to discern from genetic results. We think it is time to develop an approach that brings together social and biological data to understand the complexities of past kinship.
This session aims to work across different approaches to kinship in the past, building on data and interpretative frameworks from all involved disciplines to push the discussion further towards a more integrated method for understanding kinship and relatedness among ancient societies as well as to outline the epistemological limitations.
We welcome researchers involved in ancient DNA, archaeology, bioarchaeology, and social anthropology working on any time, period, or data type. We particularly invite new case studies developing interdisciplinary methods to reconstruct biological relatedness and infer social structures in ancient groups or populations as well as re-evaluations of previously published work.
Keywords:
Anthropology, biological relatedness, kinship, social structure, ancient DNA, interdisciplinarity
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Maïté Rivollat (Belgium) 1,2,3,4
Co-organisers:
Catherine Frieman (Australia) 5
Wolfgang Haak (Germany) 4
Affiliations:
1. Ghent University, Belgium
2. Durham University, UK
3. Bordeaux University, France
4. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
5. Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
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